Every spring, for centuries, Muslims from across eastern and southern Palestine set off on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Nabi Musa (Prophet Moses), located southwest of Jericho. At the shrine, peasants, bedouin, ʿulamaʾ, urban residents, and sufis prayed and sought blessings (barakāt) in this world and the next, enjoying hearty meals paid for by wealthy patrons. During the 19th century, the festival’s rituals expanded to Jerusalem. Under the careful supervision of Ottoman officials, pilgrims walked in processions behind their respective village or family banners, making their way to Jerusalem and praying at al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary, site of the Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock) before continuing to the shrine.
Scholars of religion have tended to discuss the rituals associated with the Nabi Musa festival as an example of unchanging Muslim folk traditions. Historians of modern Palestine, meanwhile, have tended to frame the festival, especially from 1920 onward, as either a flashpoint in rising intercommunal tensions between Jews and Muslims or a site of Palestinian nationalist mobilization against British imperialism and Zionist settler colonialism. Awad Halabi’s new book, Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850–1948, expands our understanding of the festival beyond these frameworks to tell a deeper, richer story, not only of the role the Nabi Musa festival played in Palestinian culture and society but also how the festival itself was transformed during a tumultuous stretch of time.
The book’s stated aim is to “challenge how scholars have treated Islamic rituals as univocal events unaffected by historical changes and immune to social transformations” (p. 1). Over the course of seven chapters, Halabi illustrates how local, regional, and global changes transformed key aspects of the Nabi Musa festival, and how these changes were understood and affected by Palestinians themselves. To accomplish this task, Halabi draws on a range of source material, primarily in Arabic and English. This evidence includes archival collections housed in Jerusalem, London, Oxford, and Cambridge, as well as an extensive array of travelogues, newspapers, government publications, memoirs, correspondence, and ethnographic reports. Together, these diverse sources allow Halabi to provide the most comprehensive picture to date of the Nabi Musa festival and its place in Palestinian society.
The first three chapters of Palestinian Rituals of Identity trace the origins and development of the festival up to 1920. What began as a local pilgrimage site in the 11th or 12th century CE received a boost in 1269, when the Mamluk Sultan Baybars commissioned the construction of a domed shrine and established a waqf. The Mamluk and Ottoman periods saw a gradual increase in the number of people participating in the traditional pilgrimage to the shrine, though it remained a largely local tradition. In the late 19th century, Ottoman officials added Jerusalem to the festival’s itinerary, in part because they were keen to project their authority over the holy city during a time of growing Western claims. Christian and Jewish inhabitants were increasingly welcomed as a part of the festivities, transforming these sites into shared “secular spaces” in Palestine (p. 18). But as British rulers conquered Palestine and facilitated Zionist colonization after World War I, they introduced laws that discriminated against Palestine’s native inhabitants. This development, in turn, provoked anticolonial opposition that the British interpreted as religious hostility. Such was the case with the violence that broke out during the 1920 Nabi Musa festival. With deft and sensitivity, Halabi lays out the events that unfolded that first week of April and how they were understood in Arab, Jewish, and British accounts. Importantly, the author emphasizes the role of British racialized discourses not only in creating the sectarianized conditions that led to the violence, but also in shaping how the violence, itself, would be used to justify Britain’s subsequent attempts to control the festival and its participants. The resulting account helps us see more clearly how the racist attitudes of British colonial rulers created the very sectarian strife they claimed to want to contain.
The next three chapters provide an account of the intra-Palestinian discourses and occasional tensions surrounding the festival’s growing nationalist significance during the Mandate period. Palestine’s co-opted urban elite, including the British-appointed Mufti Amin al-Husayni, hoped the festival “would serve the functionalist goals of civil religion to legitimize their role as national leaders while remaining honorable interlocutors with the British” (p. 100). But, as Halabi shows, they were challenged by younger nationalists utilizing the new tactics of mass politics, such as “chanting slogans and giving speeches articulating their Arab national identity and support for militant resistance,” to convey their larger anticolonial message (p. 124). Meanwhile, the participation of several non-elite groups during this period maintained decidedly “nonnational inflections,” which are often overlooked by scholars framing the festivals as sites of nationalist contestation (p. 125). Halabi tells the fascinating stories of anti-Zionist communist Jews, peasants, bedouin, women, and Sufis, all of whom participated in the festivals in ways that defied “the hegemonic notion of nationalism that Palestine’s Arab political and religious leaders had hoped to engender” (p. 156). In doing so, he invites readers to consider how the ritual’s various contested meanings reflect a more dynamic Palestinian society than is often portrayed by scholars. The final chapter and epilogue trace the decline of the festival during the decade preceding the 1948 Nakba and later efforts to revive the festival under the Palestinian Authority.
The organization and style of Palestinian Rituals of Identity are logical and effective. The text is scholarly in tone, but without being weighed down by jargon. Halabi connects his empirical findings to the theoretical insights of a range of religious studies scholars, although he could have engaged a bit more with the theoretical literature on “identity” in light of the book’s title. Halabi’s findings are bolstered by ample references and careful documentation in the endnotes, and a thorough bibliography helps guide those who seek to conduct further research.
A few minor mistakes occasionally distract the reader. For example, the festival attendees who enjoyed ruz mufalfal were likely eating steamed rice not “peppered rice,” and the group of pilgrims who defied their designation as passive spectators hailed from the Palestinian village of Bitunya/Beitunia, not “Baytuniyya” (pp. 78, 132). In addition, while the book contains some pictures, they are small and grainy, making it difficult for the reader to discern the details of what was undoubtedly a fascinating sight to behold. Finally, the book would have benefitted from a bit more careful copyediting.
Nonetheless, I highly recommend Palestinian Rituals of Identity. It joins a growing body of scholarship that expands our understanding of Palestinian social and cultural history beyond nationalist frameworks and invites us to reconsider Islamic rituals in the 20th century more broadly. This book is an excellent addition to the shelves of scholars and students alike.
